- When it comes to prison,
you think you know, but you don't know.
(dramatic music)
Hi, my name is Coss Marte,
and I'm the founder and CEO of ConBody.
And I was incarcerated for six years in New York state.
Rikers Island, Sparfield, Elmira.
Right now I'm a personal trainer,
and I founded this company, ConBody, to hire
formerly incarcerated people to teach our fitness classes.
So we run our prison-style boot camp.
And what we do is go back into prison
and we train these guys to become personal trainers.
(upbeat music)
Are jail and prisons the same thing?
Yes, no.
So the answer is no.
Basically, jail, it's a holding space
where you're gonna be seeing the judge
and you're fighting a case until you're proven guilty.
Once you're proven guilty, that's when
you're sentenced to prison.
So jail is the first step,
and then you'll be sentenced to prison right after jail.
What do you eat in prison?
Filet mignon, Nutraloaf, depends on the day.
It does depend on the day.
Some days, you have like a good chow
where you're gonna get like maybe something
that looks like chicken, that tastes like chicken.
But then you also could
eat the Nutraloaf when you get in trouble
and you're in solitary confinement.
It tastes disgusting, and there was never filet mignon.
Are you really afraid of dropping the soap?
Yes, no, sometimes.
Yes, no I'm (beep) with you.
No, I was never afraid of dropping the soap.
I mean, you hear the rumors when you watch these shows,
and the first time I went to jail,
it was like a lot of that prison rumor,
you went to prison you probably got raped
or anything like that, is all B.S.
This is not the 80s, and this is not "Oz."
How many hours a day do you spend in your cell
while you're in solitary confinement?
Eight hours, 12 hours,
23 hours, 24 hours.
So you spend 23 hours.
You're required to get one hour rec.
(upbeat music)
I was actually violated and was not given that hour of rec,
and I spent 24-hour lockdown for 30 days.
Do you stay in the same prison for all of your sentence?
Yes or no.
No, you go through different phases.
You go from jail to prison,
and you have to go through a reception process,
then you land in another prison.
And in the six years I was incarcerated,
I ended up in seven prisons.
(upbeat music)
Which colors do inmates wear?
Red, orange,
blue, white.
All of the above.
It varies from prison to prison.
Most of the time, you cannot wear what the guards wear.
(upbeat music)
They're afraid that you probably could
sew a prison guard's like uniform
and walk out the door with it.
True or false, inmates often segregate by race.
True.
When you go into a prison, even a yard,
you'll see handball courts are segregated.
You go to a mess hall, the tables are segregated.
Even the phones that you use
inside of a prison pod, they're all segregated by race.
Which of these innovations can be made
by inmates in a prison?
A lighter made out of battery and headphone wires.
A fryer made out of a metal bed frame and a iron.
A tattoo gun made out of a staple
and a inside of a tape cassette player.
So all of the above was all made while I was in prison,
and I actually used to make some of these things.
(upbeat music)
In your experience, are prison escapes common or not?
Very common, occasionally, rarely.
Prison escapes are rarely attempted.
I've never seen one happen
in the incarceration period that I've been in.
(upbeat music)
You might see once in a blue, a Shawshank Redemption story,
but not very common.
If try to even attempt to escape from prison,
you get an additional charge on top
of your prison sentence that you already received.
From a scale of one to 10, how realistic
is Orange is the New Black?
One, three, eight, 10.
I would say eight, most of it is realistic.
(upbeat music)
But like, escaping out of the yard when the gate opens,
and diving into the lake, that is not real,
and it's not gonna happen.
And now you know.
(upbeat music)